


there's a room where the light won't find you

by nirav



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-05
Updated: 2013-12-05
Packaged: 2018-01-03 13:37:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1071082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirav/pseuds/nirav
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The victory march sounds, and she stands, hurls her axe into a tree, and waits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there's a room where the light won't find you

Before she’s reaped, she has three brothers, two parents, one home.  Her name rings out for the whole district to hear and she doesn’t move but suddenly there’s an empty ten foot radius around here, people recoiling from her.  She doesn’t move until there’s a Peacekeeper at her side, gloved hand rough around her bicep—his fingers wrap around her arm entirely and overlap with themselves; she’s only sixteen, and small for her age—and she half-walks, half-stumbles to the stage.

Somewhere in the background her father is shouting, his voice rough and rolling off of the concrete surrounding them, but she doesn’t look back.  Her hands shake, but she keeps her head up as long as she can.

She can climb, better than almost anyone, and when she’s deposited into a room to say goodbye to her family, panic sets in because her father can carry a railroad tie on one shoulder but the tears in his voice had been there for the whole district to hear, because her brothers are just _kids_ , because her mother is too fragile for this world they live in.  So she climbs.  Chair to desk to filing cabinet to bookshelves to rafters, cramming herself back into a dark corner of flamboyantly tall ceilings just before the doors creaks open and her family stumbles in.

The coppery taste of blood leaks onto her tongue as she bites down on the inside of her cheek.  Her father is a trembling mess, his broad shoulders shaking and tears leaking down into his beard; her youngest brother is crying around the thumb in his mouth; her middle brother clings to their mother’s leg.  The oldest—all of twelve—is trying to be stoic, but his eyes are bright with tears.

Her father storms out of the room and yells at the Peacekeepers, searching for her, and her brothers trail after him, but her mother just pauses, eyes lifting skyward, and Johanna’s arms shiver under the sudden need to let go and fall.  Her mother taught her how to climb, long before she was old enough to strap spikes to her shoes and follow her father up the tallest trunks, and always stood below, ready to catch Johanna when she fell, all gangly limbs and clothes sticky with pine sap.

“Just come home, sweetie.”

The wood here doesn’t smell like real pine anymore, and she manages until her mother leaves the room, words still heavy in the air, before half-tumbling, half-climbing to the floor.

 

 

On the train she has one mentor and one competitor.  The mentor is old, a creaky woman half-blazed on drugs who can barely pronounce her own name for an introduction.  The competitor is seventeen, with the broad shoulders and thick forearms of the boys who shoved huge sawblades through huger tree trunks.

She’ll never overpower him.  Or anyone.  The volunteers from One and Two are strong and vicious, the ones from Four wiry and determined.  Everyone else is written off before the opening parades even begin.

The roar of the Capital is deafening, like mill engines and the way a tree trunk exploded outside their house one afternoon, struck dead on by lightning, and she cringes unintentionally from the wave of sound.  The spikey heel of one shoe catches on the hem of her dress and she almost stumbles out of the back of the chariot, saved only by grabbing onto her fake-partner’s arm.  When the cameras are gone, he sneers at her, yanking the collar of his shirt loose and letting the muscles in his arms flex and ripple in the dim light of the tunnel.

“Well, at least I don’t have to worry about taking you out in there.”  He strides off, tall and broad, and she slumps against the wall behind her, kicking off her shoes and cursing their impracticality.

If anyone from Seven is going home, she sure as hell won’t let it be him.

 

 

Training is a new type of nightmare.  People throw swords and spears, flip knives between their fingers, build snares blindfolded.  She wanders over to the weapons rack, thinning herself to sidle past the herd of Careers and hangers-on, slides her fingers over a hatchet, an axe.

“What’re you gonna do with those?” The girl from Two is tall and beautiful, all long muscle and red red freckles and clear grey eyes.  Her lips curve into a smirk but it falters for a moment when Johanna’s fingers tremble before darting back from the axe.

She could pick up the axe, spin it easily in one hand the way her father taught her, climb the walls with it, throw it expertly into any one of the targets here, but that would be too easy and easy is never good in the games.

“Just looking,” she mutters, wrapping her fingers around one another.

“Don’t let them see you hesitate.  They’ll eat you alive,” Two—she has a name, Johanna knows it somewhere, but names are too easy, just like throwing an axe—says quietly before hitching her smirk back into place.

Johanna swallows her curiosity and wanders away again.  Jeers from the other tributes follow her across the gym and, silently, as she retrains her fingers to build traps and snares, she builds a strategy.

 

 

 _Step one: look like you’re trying_  
 

She walks out of the assessment with a moderate score of six.  When the escort flutters between the two tributes, praising his nine and trying to encourage her that a six isn’t _bad_ , she bites down on her tongue.  He smirks at her, and bloods coats her teeth.

 

 

_Step two: let them kill each other off_

The arena is hot and dry, a dehydrated forest of pine trees.  She abandons the cornucopia and the blood soaking into the ground there, finds the treeline and cover and an easy enough tree to climb, up up up up up until she can watch safely as the other idiots murder each other.

Her district partner takes a hit to the shoulder as he tries to make it to the same treeline and she watches, passive, as he stumbles around, arm limp, blood spilling out of him.   She hops from branch to branch, down the tree, until she can yank the backpack and axe from his dying fingers before scaling easily back up the tree.

The sun sets, and the cannon echoes fourteen times.

Nine more.

 

 

_Step three: start swinging your axe until you can go home_

The sun’s only been down for a few minutes on the second day when the two from district one are creeping through the treeline, hands stained with blood from two other tributes, looking for a place to set up camp.  She watches, waits, rubs at her eyes until they’re red and bloodshot, before hopping silently to the next tree over, then the next, then makes her way down.  She hits the ground, intentional and loud, and stumbles towards their fire.

It takes less than a minute of pleading, just like her baby brother when he didn’t want a bath, to convince them that she can help them—she can climb, after all, and be a scout—in exchange for protection and food.  They fall asleep propped against a tree trunk, shoulder to shoulder, their necks tantalizingly close together.

She crouches on the other side of the fire, watching, until they’re deep asleep, and then it takes just one well-placed swing to do enough damage to both of them that a cannon somewhere is getting prepped.  The girl gurgles for a split second and dies, and her cannon goes.  The boy takes longer, blood bubbling out of his mouth and rolling out of his nicked carotid.  She stares down at him, flecks of blood hot on her face, and watches as he dies.

“Please,” he manages to choke out at one point.

She’s packing up their food and kicking dirt into the fire as he does.  The pack is heavy, but she shoulders it easily, pausing to kneel at his side. 

“No,” she says, wiping her blade clean on the leg of his pants.  She walks off without looking back, and two minutes later a cannon bellows.

Five more.

 

 

She finds another one a day later, catches her with her boots off and feet in the pathetic creek, wincing as she clean the horrendous blisters on her soles.

There’s no hesitation as Johanna creeps up behind her.  One swing, base of the skull.  Her rudimentary understanding of anatomy doesn’t fail her, and the girl dies immediately.  The cannon rings out before her body slips down into the creek, blood spilling into the water.

Johanna makes her way upstream, refills her water bottle.  By sunset, the only other ones left are the boy from four and the girl from two.

 

 

She climbs a tree as the late afternoon sun starts to set.  There’s a hot breeze skittering through the trees, and something like a plan is taking shape in her mind when the cannon goes off again.

The hovercraft appears, lifting a body, and she watches from the trees until a flash of red hair catches her eye.  The girl from two is limping, as she makes her way through the forest.  She stumbles to a stop a few trees away, falling gracelessly to the ground. 

Johanna grips her axe tighter—the throw from up here is possible, but difficult—and is weighing the risks when she realizes the other girl is cutting away her pants leg above the knee.  Calculations fall away as the other girl strips yanks her belt off and bites down on it and then, unceremoniously and without hesitation, digs bloody fingers into the gash in her thigh.  Johanna bites down on her own fist until tears cloud her eyes when a strangled scream escapes past the leather in the other girl’s mouth.  It peters off into a groan and she yanks her hand back abruptly, dropping a bloodstained arrowhead—spear tip?—onto the ground next to her.

She’s making her way down the tree before her mind catches up, striding through the forest and plopping down facing the other girl. 

“Put that down,” Johanna says sharply, pointing at the dagger the other girl reached for. 

“The little girl from seven,” she says, quiet and bemused.  “Didn’t see that coming.”

“Yeah, well,” Johanna shrugs.  “I’m good at hiding.”

“Seven…lumber…you were in the trees the whole time?”

“Yeah, basically.”  The lie is easy because she’s come too far to fall. “Pretty exhausting.”

“I’m sure.”  She pushes short red hair off of her forehead.  Her cheeks are flushed under the freckles, eyes shining.  Johanna’s seen this before, life-threatening wounds from mill and lumber accidents, the fever-bright glassy eyes that come before the decline.  “Probably as exhausting as getting stabbed in the leg.”

“Probably,” Johanna says vaguely.  She glances up at the sky.  The sun’s almost down.  “What do you say we wait on the whole fight to the death thing until tomorrow?”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“Because even like this I’m pretty sure I could still take you in a fair fight.”

“Fair,” Johanna barks out.  “Right, because all of this is fair.”

“It is what it is.” She shrugs.  “But whatever.  I’ll sit here and stare at you until I get my strength back, if that’s what you want.  I can go home tomorrow instead of tonight.”

Johanna is silent, resettling against her own tree.  She wipes at the edge of her blade with her t-shirt, cleaning it habitually.

“How many people did you kill?” she asks eventually.  The redhead blinks at her in surprise, head cocking to one side.

“That’s a mighty personal question for the next person on the list, don’t you think?”

“I’ve been hiding the whole time,” she lies smoothly.  “Just curious.”

“Six.”  The answer comes quietly, and Johanna swallows it in silence.  “What about you?”

“I told you,” Johanna says around a dry mouth.  “Hiding the whole time.  It works wonders.”

“Yeah, sure.”  She pokes at her injured leg.

“Want some water to clean that?”

“You have to be kidding me.  Do you have any idea how this works?”

“Maybe not.”  She tosses the canteen across the space between them.  “Either way, it’s over by tomorrow, and I’ve got plenty of water.”

“How the hell did you live this long?” She uncorks the canteen, pouring water carefully over the wound in her leg.  “Nice people never survive this long.”

“Just lucky, I guess,” Johanna mutters. 

“So who are you going home to?”

“Family,” Johanna says after a moment’s hesitation.  “Three younger brothers.  You?”

“Just me and my brother now,” she says quietly.  “Parents died when we were younger.”

“Then why did you volunteer?”

She shrugs.  “Academy gives you a place to live for free, so he didn’t have to worry about feeding me.  Only catch is that you have to volunteer.”

“Well,” Johanna says.  “That was a shitty plan.”

There’s a sudden rumble, and then the entire ground rolls underneath them.  A tree uproots nearby as the earthquake continues, and Johanna scrambles away from the sound of cracking wood.  The girl from two is struggling to her feet as a tree falls towards them; Johanna reaches for her on instinct—the lumber teams look out for one another, her parents taught her, like a family—but jerks back at the last instant.

The other girl stumbles, half-falls, almost makes it clear.  A branch clips her shoulder and she collapses at the impact, leaving her dazed and half-immobilized on the ground.

Johanna crouches next to her, leaning over her prone body.  Her narrow shoulders block the moonlight from red hair and her fingers hover over a freckled cheek, never quite touching. 

“Guess you’re not so nice.”  It comes out heavy and tired, choked on the dust thrown up from the falling tree.

“Guess not.”  Her arm draws back, the axe heavy and familiar in her hand, and she hesitates, bile rising in her throat.

“Close your eyes,” she says quietly.  “It won’t hurt.”

“Maybe you are nice.”  Grey eyes, foggy with pain, meet hers for a moment before squinting shut.

She strikes once.  Blood sprays over her, but it’s a clean hit.  The cannon sounds as soon as her blade touches skin: this one, at least, didn’t suffer.

The victory march sounds, and she stands, hurls her axe into a tree, and waits.

 

 

Home is a lie.  Her father can’t speak to her anymore, the four children murdered at her hand dark in his gaze when he sees the easy way she carries an axe, the shadows circling under her eyes.  Her brothers avoid her, fear in the whites of their eyes.

Her mother is the only one who comes to help when Johanna wakes screaming in the middle of the night, clawing at the blood she’s sure is still on her face.  She climbs right into Johanna’s bed and holds her, easy and strong, like a baby.

No one in seven will talk to her anymore.  The family of her district partner glare at her in the streets.  Strangers avoid her.  Her father, when he thinks she isn’t there to hear, mourns the quiet girl he knew and loved, stolen away by the Capital and murdered by this killer.

The victory tour starts, and she’s never been so happy to be paraded in front of a country full of people who hate her now, because her family is staying home.

 

 

Finnick Odair intercepts her in four, hooks a hand through her elbow and ushers her through a set of doors with a quiet murmur.

“Do what he asks.  Trust me.”

She doesn’t have time to ask _what_ before she’s being lead into an office by Peacekeepers, to where President Snow and the flowery stench rolling off of him wait for her.

“Miss Mason,” he says.  “You’ve put on quite the performance, fooling people as you did.”

She folds her arms across her chest, glaring at him.  “I did what I had to.”

“To survive, yes,” he says.  “That you did.  Now that you’ve proven yourself so admirably capable of putting on performances, I’ve come to realize what an asset you could be in the Capital.”

“Asset?”

“Yes, like young Mister Odair.  His participation is instrumental in managing the more—social side of the politics in the Capital.”

He smiles at her, hands steepled in front of his chin.  “I’m sure you could do an admirable job at filling in the cracks that he’s missed.”

Her jaw sets as realization settles in, and her hands clench for an invisible axe.  “No.”

“No?”

“I’m not going to be some show pony whore you can trot out to raise money or what the hell ever it is Odair does.”

“I would strongly suggest that you reconsider,” President Snow says amicably.

“There’s nothing to consider.”

“Perhaps you just need time to think about it.”  He presses a button, and the door opens behind her.  “Please do so as you continue on the tour.” 

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she says, venomous and sharp, and spins on her heel and marches out.

 

 

Two days later, the tour stops in two.  The redheaded girl’s name was Spark.  Her gray eyes shine from her portrait, easy and friendly and mischievous, and Johanna barely makes it offstage after the speeches before throwing up on her escort’s shoes.

 

 

The day after the ball in the Capital, word comes from home.  A fire.  Her mother, her brothers, all dead.  Her father alive only because he’d been at work.

By the time she’s made it home that evening, all clammy skin and nausea and desperate for her father, he’s already stolen a Peacekeeper’s gun and shot himself.

She buries her family and sits in her mansion alone.

“Miss Mason.”  President Snow stands in front of her.  “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

She sneers at him, dull and tired and apathetic.

“I hate to be indelicate, but have you reconsidered our conversation from last week?  There are many people who would like to meet you.”

“You screwed yourself,” she says.  Her lip curls with distaste.  “What are you going to threaten me with now?  That was everyone I had.”

She walks out of the room, out of the house, into the woods, and leaves him standing in a house full of ghosts.

 


End file.
